"For somebody to feel they’re going to testify before the grand jury, they must have a very profound sense of their innocence." – defense attorney (and former prosecutor) Charles Kelly, referring to former Clark County Commissioner Lynette Boggs‘ decision to testify to a grand jury investigating perjury and filing false document charges against her.

Yes, a profound sense of their innocence. Or perhaps faith their their own force of personality might convince grand jurors that an indictment shouldn’t be handed up? Maybe even a little faith in the almighty, that lo, though they walk in valley of the shadow of prison, they shall fear no legal consequences, for the rod and staff of righteousness are available for comfort?

Well, you can forget that. Our colleague Jon Ralston just broke the news that the grand jury decided to indict Boggs.

And here’s the thing: Boggs is most certainly guilty of the charges against her, i.e., she actually lived at an address outside her former commission district while she signed papers saying she lived at another address inside the district. An investigation sponsored by the police and Culinary unions has proven that. So, she should have been indicted.

But Boggs has also never been one to shrink from a fight, from confronting those arrayed against her with force and fury, and not a little bit of fire and brimstone thrown in for good measure. We have no doubt that she still believes God is on her side, and will rescue her from the heathen justice system that now seeks her punishment.

Was not St. Paul freed from prison by an earthquake, after having been wrongly jailed and beaten? Indeed, says the Bible, he was. So why not his servant Lynette, who in her life after the commission has founded a new Christian radio ministry and traveled to Africa to spread the good news of Christ crucified and risen from the dead?

Well, perhaps because unlike St. Paul, Boggs McDonald transgressed against the laws of man, and bore false witness to her own address for the purpose of holding on to a commission seat in a difficult election? And even though her actions may be understandable — she was going through a divorce at the time and most likely didn’t want to live at the small home inside her district with her soon-to-be-ex-husband — what she did was illegal, and she knew, or should have known, it.

The temptation is to invoke Job, the patriarch who suffered at the hands of Satan for no reason other than to prove that God is the creator of the universe and can do what he wills with his creation. But even that isn’t apt; Job, we’re told, was a righteous man before his trials, and his faith was only shaken when his righteousness was repaid with suffering. The upshot of the story is a lesson Boggs should learn, too: There’s nothing fair about life, and even the most righteous people suffer. In the modern translation, shit happens.

No, it seems to us the most apt example is the thief crucified with Jesus on Calvary: He was a sinner who recognized his sin, and found salvation only in his punishment, the consequences of which he had to suffer regardless. But that day, Jesus said, the thief would be with him in paradise.

But for that to be apt, Boggs would have to acknowledge her sin, plead guilty and suffer the consequences. That would be an act of contrition that might just persuade some cynics that there still is such a thing as genuine faith and redemption.

But we haven’t seen it yet. And given the rapidity with which the grand jury handed up that indictment — just one day after hearing Boggs testify in her own behalf — there are reasons more than spiritual for her to consider legal surrender to her fate.

» Speaking of sin and denial, the saga of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig is producing some interesting fallout. After his news conference on Tuesday — "I am not gay. I never have been gay." — all sorts of people are tossing him overboard. People like Mitt Romney, who ejected Craig from his U.S. Senate election committee. People like U.S. Sen. John Ensign, who joined in a call for the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Craig. And people like Focus on the Family, which took to the airwaves Tuesday to suggest that perhaps it was time for Craig to retire and focus on fixing his moral failings.

Moral failings. Interesting.

Because in Craig’s news conference, reading a prepared statement but taking no questions, the embattled senator also used the word failings. He used it to describe his guilty plea to a charge of disorderly conduct for his suspicious behavior in a Minneapolis airport restroom, a plea he now says he made to make the incident "go away."

And while he repeatedly stressed he had no legal advice prior to pleading guilty, the fact is, Craig was read his rights, and signed off on his plea knowing full well that it entailed him taking responsibility for violating the law. An innocent person so accused couldn’t be kept from demanding he be fully and completely cleared; but Craig admitted he was guilty, freely and of his own volition.

But he’s sorry. Not for the incident. Not for hypocrisy. Not for allegedly lying about what happened. No, he’s sorry for the one thing he did right in the entire situation: Taking responsibility for his actions.

Talk about a failure. We tend to agree with Focus on the Family (for perhaps the first and only time): Craig should quit. But not to focus on the moral failings of his sexuality. He is who he is, whether other people like it or not. He should quit because this incident, and the way he’s handled it, show he lacks the judgment to be in the Senate in the first place.

» Forgive us, readers, for we have erred. On Tuesday, we expressed surprise at the fact that U.S. Sen. John Ensign finally criticized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales only after he finally quit, and then rather tepid criticism at that.

But after reading our colleague Jon Ralston’s column in today’s Las Vegas Sun, in which Ensign details the things that went wrong with Gonzales’ administration of the Justice Department, we remembered something: Ensign is a liar.

See, Ensign once openly admitted that he agreed with pro-war comedian Dennis Miller, who once said that even if he didn’t believe in the war effort, as long as troops were in harm’s way in Iraq, he’d lie and say he did. (We’ve been searching for a better definition of cowardice, but we’re hard pressed to come up with one.)

Consequently, no matter what happens, it’s a good bet that Ensign won’t be telling the truth about his actual feelings, whether about the war, or about Gonzales, or the president, or anything else for that matter. Once a man will admit that he’d lie about something so vital, nothing he says can be believed.

» Ouch, baby. That’s not the way to get buzz with political insiders!

It seems that Review-Journal columnist Jane Ann Morrison’s most recent error (in which she confused "colostomy bag" with something she referred to as a "colonoscopy bag") made The Hotline’s correction of the day. (We’d link, but there’s a hefty subscription fee.)

Speaking objectively, we tend to think that this pseudo-correction to a massively incorrect column, which was supposedly an eyewitness account of a car accident, should get nominated for Correction of the Year. (We dissected the attempted coverup in a previous blog.)

Still, knowing that an Internet search for "colostomy bag" will someday turn up some of your work can’t be easy on any journalist, or columnist, or whatever.